 |
Preamble
We cannot promise you a short or simple journey here. What we can promise is that, if you approach what is here with care and determination, you will find it not just rewarding but life-changing also.
Humankind is suffering from a great separation between its deliberate or rational nature and its instinctive and spontaneous nature. The British philosopher, Lancelot Law Whyte, called it ‘dissociation’, in the sense of a break or a lesion. Richard Wagner also acknowledged it in his final work, Parsifal. It is at the root of many of today’s obsessions and is bringing much grief to individuals and society.
Another affect of this dissociation is that by concentrating on our ‘rational’ side or making moral judgements using inadequate information or awareness (as in mob hysteria) and trying to suppress or ignore our instinctive side, we think or attempt to be aware, in what we might call frozen snapshots, biased labels or doctrinaire beliefs, as distinct from a more unified awareness that reflects the flow that embraces us and our world.
The dissociation is expressed dramatically through human sexuality which today also exhibits an exaggerated form of the more general dissociation or dualism by being criminalized at the same time as we are all being increasingly eroticized. In the forty years since Lancelot Law Whyte died, the obsessions and social distortions he feared from the dualism have worsened. On this web site and in a related book human sexuality has been selected as the major human issue where the dualism can be both examined and dealt with. Whyte recommended this approach but did not follow it through.
In our unhappy and distorted state, many of us, not all of course, need to disavow our hated and often seemingly obscene desires and project them onto others and there is no better object for this than the bogeyman. We’ve always had bogeymen, such as heretics, witches and homosexuals, but for as long as there was an identifiable different and more important enemy to hate, such as the Soviets during the Cold War, the bogeymen did not appear to get out of control. A new bogeyman to emerge recently, however, was the ordinary adult male transmogrified into the rapacious (and raping) ‘woman and child abuser’ by victim feminists. In addition to bogeymen we had bouts of public hysteria and moral panics, Salem, the recent satanic abuse scares and UFO abductions, the last of which also appeared to have the objective of sex abuse.
When the Berlin Wall came down and signalled the end of the Cold War, we lost the big bogeyman of the Soviet enemy. Almost in the same year, 1989, the world saw the first big sex abuse moral panic that was through American channelled globalization to sweep the world. It was the public trial phase of the US Mc Martin pre-school sex abuse scandal, the first of many to come and possibly the beginning of the child sex abuse moral panic. Now the victim feminism that began the moral panic or set out its conditions was joined by a much more powerful ally – the need for a new bogeyman. All the erotophobic sadism that was once foisted upon homosexuals and other ‘monsters’ now began to migrate onto ‘paedophiles’. And with ordinary men now regarded as potential abusers, if not rapists, by a feminist ideology that was invading virtually all educational establishments and becoming a normal part of everyday life and work, no man was safe from accusation.
The latent and often patent self-hatred smouldering within many of us, stoked by the dissociation and the contradictions it imposed upon us, was channelled into a malignant misanthropy masquerading as ‘child protection’, child protection being the vehicle for the ‘othered’ misanthropy. The concept of the ‘child’ itself became a signifier, the object signified being the ‘abused child’, or one likely to be abused if not at all times protected from prowling paedophiles – that is, any man that might be one. In fact by now we all see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, who probably never really existed except in a tiny minority, but it is too late for that consideration now.
A dreadful development, made possible by a combination of moral panic and legislative creep and aided by disingenuous individuals and groups seeking influence and power, has been the emergence and rise of a new fascism based on social behaviour, heavily orientated towards sexual activities. The fascists are the new moral leaders who legislate for and monitor and police us, principally in matters of sexual behaviour but also in how we talk or write about race or religion or minority groups. The empowering of ordinary police to investigate many of our sexual inclinations or activities has given them authority away beyond their abilities to understand what they are investigating. The new fascist administration is made up of legislators, the already corrupted legal profession, the judiciary, the police and a host of social workers, probation officers and ‘experts’. There is an enormous disproportion in power between these fascists and those they claim to police. One example is that if accused of a sex crime, one finds it close to impossible to find either a defence solicitor or a defence expert witness. The latter tend to work only for the prosecution and the former tend not to want that kind of client.
As in all triumphalist fascist regimes, through a compliant media the bullies in power easily obtain a public veneration bought by preaching about their cause - that of witch catching, jew-baiting, paedo-smashing. Both bully and ardent public admirer appear to be enjoying a form of obscene sadism.
This next suggestion may seem outrageous to some and please write if you believe it to be.Genocide occurs when there is an enormous disproportion in power between aggressor and victim. In the American gulag that plans for and overseas the programme for the labelling, naming, shunning, hounding and displacement of ‘sex offenders’ (paedophiles) are the officials with enormous power. Ironically, the ‘offenders’ are the victims. The gulag also is made up of politicians, police and media. The genocide, however, is directed at (by now millions of) mainly male individuals spread throughout all walks of life and all communities, very like Salem where no one was safe either.
Now some of this is examined further.
Disavowal and projection - D and P
D and P, or ‘dnp’ for convenience, is the denial or disavowing of shameful and even hated desires and their transference or projection onto others, in this process creating a hated enemy. Let us call this disavowing and projection ‘dnp-ing’. It is how the monsters of the ‘paedophile’ and ‘sex offender’ have been created. These monsters are thus creations bred within oneself, suppressed, denied, rejected or disavowed, and transferred or projected onto others with all the hate and venom their inherent contradictions have inspired.
Disavowal and projection of unwanted sexual desires is a common expression of the dissociation just discussed. It is not unusual to see high profile male practitioners caught out performing the very acts they claim to abhor when done by others.
Disavowal and projection in matters of human sexuality are so universal and so powerful that they have permeated the legislative, social and police systems, creating a ‘ruling class’ or cartel of ‘the policers’ and an underclass of offenders, the latter for example shamed and shunned by sex offender registry rules, and, as in America, hounded from home and state.
The zeal and hatred, with which the policers hound the offenders, are fanned by the dissociation of their natural or true selves from their desired or assumed selves. They are, however, fighting a projection and when one fights a projection the war is never over, but it is also ultimately doomed, although many people will be destroyed in the process. Witness how the Nazis became even more genocidal when their extermination programme had failed to expunge all the Jews. Those who remained seemed terrifyingly more dangerous to them.
Some psychologists also call it 'othering' – the planting on other people or groups of one’s own secret or tortured desires. Virtue purchased by means of othering unwanted desires can become a violent and potentially genocidal lie.
As for the concept that 'paedos exist in vast shadowy conspiratorial 'rings', it is extraordinarily difficult to relinquish such a horror story precisely because one has been surreptitiously enjoying it and evidence is usually relatively ineffective in persuading someone to relinquish a pleasure, especially when it is socially sanctioned.
The child
The child could be a symbol of our sought after unity, an object of our love and adoration, a manifestation of beauty, but the Establishment has transformed the child into what some linguistics practitioners call a signifier (the signifier being the word, the signified the thing or idea it represents). Child thus becomes 'sexually endangered/abused child'. For the more thoughtful, this of course creates the paradox where we have become accustomed to see children through the eyes of the ‘paedophile’, thus all in a sense becoming ‘paedophiles’. This new signifier of the ‘child’ is more virulent than just about any other term in bringing out the very worst in human misanthropy and paranoia. Why it has happened in our times requires much reflection and perhaps future historians will provide some answers.
We have a limitless capacity to believe our own preferred lies, especially if this promises to get us off the hook (me good, others bad); and certainly, most people prefer their own self-deceptions to someone else's truth. A colleague who advises me says, “The authorities' fraught preoccupation with endangered and abused children, from a psychoanalytic perspective at least, tells us a lot about their unconscious desires. Whilst the concern to protect is consciously embraced, it is of course the unconscious desire to violate and obscenely enjoy that is projected. People who get institutionally labelled as paedophiles are being used as screens to portray the refused desires of the virtuous. The authorities are using a crudely reductionist psychology, based on cognitive behavioural therapy. In this there is no ambiguity in language or behaviour, no fundamental opacity, no unconscious: bad people have 'inappropriate' erotic fantasies, fantasies are intentions, perched directly on the surface of behaviour where they can be read off straightforwardly by 'good' people like policemen, judges, and psychotic feminists. There is a wholly spurious omniscience at work here (ignorance and narrow-mindedness inevitably appear as authoritativeness and knowingness).”
This bit really made me think of the thousands in Operation Ore and its related and similar police raids that have had to undergo humiliating interviews and grillings in sordid police stations from officers with far less than half their education and experience. One 61 year old in particular who had just begun early retirement to continue writing after a fine career in government and university was faced with a contemptuous young policeman at the end of a long and brutal interview who said, “And I understand you were a senior officer in the (naming the government department)?” And still smirking, “And that you write books?”
He said to me, sadly, afterwards, “I thereupon watched while my whole former CV was reduced to two lines as an addendum to a sordid police charge list.”
In this as in many other cases, the Knowing and Authoritative police officer whose job it is to 'manage' people like this now crushed man could not himself write a complex sentence. As in similar past purges however, he was an instrument in an exercise in social purification, a vital component in a modern day Crucible of Misery.
Operation Ore - an example of disavowal and projection caused by the distortion.
One of the best examples of the travesties that can be caused by the dissociation and its endency for disavowal and projection was Operation Ore, carried out by the British police in the full glare of the media and now the subject of a class action against the police and prosecution service (group action in the UK). Operation Ore affected thousands of British men and their families and was an FBI-inspired spin-off from the infamous Landslide case. It now appears that of the thousands ruined in dawn raids, some of whom committed suicide, most, if not virtually all, were victims of credit card fraud. The class action will shortly be in the courts and upon its success it should spread to Canada, Australia and Ireland, all of which were also affected by similar Landslide-inspired campaigns, although Great Britain was the worst affected by far. Ironically, America was least affected. Those close to it have received a first hand insight into the ruin and devastation caused by the moral panic of sex abuse and its accompanying inquisition. The editor of this web site and author of the new book above sought many explanations and finally came up with the dissociation as expressed here.
The human unconscious may be spreading the news. Here is a very perceptive response-comment to a news story about a new UK system for issuing local sex offender warnings.
The main response-comments to the story contained the usual ‘hang all pedos’ outbursts, but then came this one: “Incidentally, it's well known that those who profess their hatred of 'nonces' most loudly are actually attempting to deflect and deny their own secret desires. Perhaps those are the ones that we should take a close look at, particularly those that have a fondness for violence.”
There exist both an individual and group unconscious and we have good reason to believe that we communicate with each other through that unconscious and that some of us at least even know things in our unconscious that out conscious is not yet aware of. Mass beliefs and hysteria work through the group unconscious. The literary critic, Leo Bersani, once noted that our unelected sexual rulers can sustain their domination on a populist basis simply because the most effective messages to transmit are the ones which are already there - the ones hiding in the unconscious, which can only be 'seen' when they painted onto to an 'outsider' who is then considered 'not us.' For example, grand-standing and creating legislation and extra police powers to control the monsters that lurk in our unconscious.
There are thinkers who regard even parental hatred of children as completely normal and understandable (although some of us might find that hard to accept) and that it becomes dangerous only when it is subjected to ‘intrapsychic censorship’ – that is saying, “I don't hate children, but they - the abusers - hate children). When it is seen in a more unified way as an ordinary emotion, to be experienced alongside love and devotion (and mitigated by its proximity to these very emotions) it is merely an aspect of everyday life. Our kids can drive us nuts at times and even fill us with despair. When this normal reaction is frozen, turned into a thing (as opposed to the flow or a process) and mentally split off, it ends up feeling as though it exists only 'outside' (which is, of course, precisely where it has been thrown). And once outside, it has to be tracked down, hounded, eradicated. Except, of course, it never can be, because in looking for bogeymen one is looking in the wrong direction: only balanced (and truthful) introspection can locate it. Those who spend their lives tracking down monsters are actually most likely to be on the run from their own unconscious impulses.
The two worlds
J. Samuel Bois, who invented epistemics, describes two worlds in which we live, as follows:
“Let us speak of two worlds in which we live. One is the empirical world of things, people, movements that we can see, phenomena that we can observe. Some call it the world of reality, and we agree to its existence and its properties because we all have the same sensory apparatus and share common perceptions.
“The other world is the world of mental constructs, our man-made and man-organized world of abstractions, or units of discourse. It is the world that we carry around with us wherever we go and whatever we do. I have called it elsewhere our structured unconscious. Each item in this world is a part of speech: noun, adjective, verb, etc. A part of speech is a unit of discourse. These units differ from one culture to another, as our units of measure (inches, feet, yards) differ from the metric system, with its millimetres, centimetres and meters, or as our units of money (dollars, quarters, dimes, and nickels) differ from the pounds and shillings of England. In matters of measurement and of money, it is evident that our mental world determines the manner in which the empirical world is parceled out- - - . From (these) evident facts, let us try to pass to the idea that our whole empirical world is also parceled out according to the mental pattern we carry about in our structured unconscious. In other words, our units of discourse determine the units of ‘reality’ we deal with in our empirical world, or - however paradoxical it may sound at the moment - our world is what we say it is.”
This requires much patient reflection, but the rewards for understanding it are very great. Bois was profoundly influenced by an earlier thinker, Alfred Korzybski, who is well-known in general semantics circles. Aristotle had been the world’s first great codifier of our methods of evaluating and the second great codification of our methods of evaluating came from Francis Bacon in his work Novum Organum (1620), named in the spirit of Aristotle's Organon. Bacon's work provided much of the infrastructure for a new stage and the use of inductive logic in science. Alfred Korzybski, writing in the 1920s, was the third codifier in Western history.
Here, in a passage from a lecture Alfred Korzybski gave in 1937, is an outstanding example of his thinking, which is relevant to a significant issue on this web site.
“Do you all understand the English word incest? Sexual intercourse within the family. Well, take the semantic environment; I can give no better example than that. In white civilization, as a matter of statistics we do not survive incest, never mind why. Wherever we have incest, even not physical but perhaps symbolic incest, we do not survive it. It always ends in prostitution, criminality, or 'mental' illness. In Egypt in the old days of the Pharaohs, incest among them was the rule and did not do any harm. Not any harm at all. Why? Semantic environment. They had a theory that incest was not harmful. Otherwise, evaluation, semantic environment; and the fact that brother was married to sister, etc., did not matter. What did not do harm in their society, in their semantic environment, is not survived in ours. You see that I speak facts. Do you begin to see what semantic environment means? Evaluational environment. Is that getting clear? That the physical facts often do not matter in comparison with semantic facts.”
This so well explains the two worlds that Bois describes. If one is hounded and shunned and perhaps imprisoned for what one reads, writes, or looks at, one’s grief comes not from the physical world but from the semantic or evaluational environment, the world where humans make dogmas, doctrines and laws, described by Bois as the world of mental constructs, our man-made and man-organized world of abstractions. So how the rules and laws are made is all-important for both our wellbeing and our survival, but the ways in which the laws are made and implemented are interwoven with the quality of the semantics, or perhaps Bois would say the epistemics, the accuracy and truth or at least truthfulness in the sense of not being artful, deceitful or disingenuous, above all not using constructs simply to communicate but as self-serving, especially to hurt others in the course of achieving our selfish or political ends.
Let us go back from the times of Korzybski and Bois (the latter doing his best thinking in the 1960s onwards) to a man who had tried to do something similar, or who had taken an earlier step, which must have proven to be very helpful to the two 20th century writers. In 1852, Roget published his world-famous thesaurus, a collection of synonyms or words arranged according to the ideas they express, as distinct from the existing dictionaries and encyclopaedia. The first encyclopaedists may have set out to explain the world itself. Roget was not a codifier of methods as much as a more sophisticated classifier.
Roget said that words are an instrument of thought, not merely a vehicle – “Giving it wings for flight.” He warned of the need to give strict accuracy to words, and how the ignoring of this causes us so many problems today – the doctrinaire labelling, the black and white thinking, the a priori bias that loads so many words and expressions. Here he could be describing so many of today’s ideological opportunists: “False logic, disguised under specious phraseology, too often gains the assent of the unthinking multitude, disseminating far and wide the seeds of prejudice and error.” Think of today’s media. This next could describe the initiation of one of our modern witch hunts: “An artful watchword, thrown among combustible materials, has kindled the flame of deadly warfare and changed the destiny of an empire.” Jew! Heretic! Enemy! Sex offender!
Roget’s thesaurus begins appropriately with Existence, under which reality and essence appear, followed by non-existence, substantiality and insubstantiality and state, as in ‘absolute condition’.
But a note of caution. While it is both desirable and probably essential for our survival to make meanings in a more careful way, ‘making meaning’ is not simply a cognitive exercise (organize, collect, laws, rules, etc.) One only has to picture an ancient man standing alone on a great plain under an even greater sky to appreciate how meaning can begin in silence at the affective level. It may begin with a sense, and combining with past experiences or other things or people around us, evolve into a feeling. The more gifted amongst us may then be able to express it in words or art.
WIGO deals with an examination of this existence and its constituent or subsidiary related expressions as above, saying as it were, “Let us express to the best of our ability, using language and certain codes or rules-about-how-we-make-our-meanings, our understanding, however changing, of what is going on.
What is the relevance of all this to the subjects on this web site? The authors believe that language and ways of thinking are both misused unknowingly and used and exploited knowingly for purposes of power and profit, and that this misuse, going hand in hand with disingenuous and criminal intentionality, has brought about a near police state and gravely threatens our individual liberty and the human imagination itself. Nowhere is this plainer than in the making of draconian laws for the alleged purpose for maintaining public morality, laws that increase the powers of the police state, set up systems of fear, public scapegoating and shunning and fill prisons, laws eagerly embraced by disingenuous politicians, self-interest groups and a media that relates mainly to the public mood, whatever that might be.
A simple early example of how the failure in correct or precise choice of words and over-simplistic thinking can lead is in the results brought about by the doctrinaire approach to human sexuality. A coalition of self-interest groups, politicians, prosecutors, police and the media have worked together to invent a shallow ideology of sexual morality. Their ideology or system is littered with black and white labelling and words and expressions filled with a priori bias. Here are just a few. ‘Disclosure’ means telling or revealing the truth, never a lie or a deception, or even a mere allegation. Its employment presents an allegation as an accepted event that must have happened as ‘disclosure’ is filled with the drama of the long suffering ‘victim’ finally revealing the dark truth. ‘Victim’ is the most common, as it means one that truly suffered and so it excludes all notions of lying for malice revenge or compensation. If the one accused pays privately to have the accusation suppressed or withdrawn, what could more correctly be called extortion or blackmail becomes ‘hush money’ and so-called ‘victims’ can go beyond the mere acceptance of ‘hush money’ (blackmail) to go public anyway and be paid again by the media.
Our assumption/position
This is open or subject to continuing correction, evolution and change. Please contribute.
So what is going on?
We live in an epistemic regime of
Doctrines and dogmas
These are deeply affected by the obsessions caused by the dissociation discussed above. Few have the means or courage to oppose them, so they are influenced by, used by, even devised by
Opportunists, demagogues and cabals
Both of the above contribute to
The making of laws
How these laws are interpreted and applied depend on
The system of justice
This can be adversarial, inquisitorial, or in rare cases protective – that is, protecting citizens and their families and property from harm from others.
If the system of justice is inquisitorial or harshly adversarial, heavily influenced by doctrines and dogmas and manipulated by opportunists and demagogues, such as corrupt and greedy members of the legal profession and judiciary we may have
A police state
This results in
The suppression of freedom of expression
Including free speech, art, drama, the use of the imagination, the acquiescence of the media, political correctness, and in general Orwellian conditions. These conditions can be maintained or worsened by moral panics, or fear of an enemy.
This in turn results in
Restriction/suppression of political activity
And in
A decrease in the potential for the repeal of laws
The process is facilitated by
A general 'dumbing down' of the population
Note the power today of television and the printed media and their virtual control by a cabal. Note also how the world's most powerful owner of media is also the biggest publisher of banal pornography over adult television channels and tabloids.
Some reflection on the above
The clear relationship between the elements that make up the police state, including the inevitable ‘legislative creep’ that makes it possible can be seen from the above. A key sub-element in the doctrines and dogmas is the crimen exceptum, the designated crime for which normal law and the processes of justice are suspended – heresy, witchcraft, being a Jew in Nazi Germany, child sex abuse, child porn, and so on. Note how child porn has been used to transform the Internet into a tool of repression and fear and a powerful device for the police and prosecution state. Whenever it is powerful enough fear of the enemy can replace the crimen exceptum, as the instrument for the suspension of justice.
Note also how these devices were used in the early inquisitions, Nazi Germany, countries under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, and McCarthy’s America, and are still being used today in Islamic fundamentalism, moral panics and social control.
A critical element, which tips the state from one of democracy into a full police state, is the suppression of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is vital for avoiding the slide into totalitarianism, but it must be attacked by the opportunists and demagogues as it exposes and undermines them. The police fear it also. When not moderated by freedom of expression, the process shown above develops almost naturally into the police state, made certain by a fatal combination of public apathy and fear, and moral indoctrination and opportunism by whatever cabal is dominant. The signs that the end of the process is near are when laws are passed that suppress criticism of the law itself and when the media bow to political correctness and to the current social ideology. A test for the last is to ask if there are any questions that are taboo. Would a journalist defend a Jew in Nazi Germany? Would a journalist question the unnatural age of sexual consent laws in Western society?
And for the epistemicists
A fascinating mental exercise is to take the model laid out above which begins with the existence of doctrines and dogmas, and imagine several other ‘domains of meaning’ or ‘levels of awareness’, in an imaginary world where we have moved beyond the domain of doctrines and dogmas, into one where we discard black and white labelling, a priori assumptions, and accept ambiguity.
An outstanding new book which gives much insight into the above is being published in chapters as they emerge - Notes from Another Country - the book about the fascism behind Operation Ore.
NEXT
BACK
Modified: 11:15 9 Aug 2006
|